Stomping Through the Savoy Cocktail Book

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Daily Archives: April 9, 2011

Hey, wait, “Mr. Manhattan,” that sounds familiar! Why, yes, we made the Mr. Manhattan with Neyah White at NOPA a couple years ago. Well, who’s going to complain about making this Julep-ish cocktail again. Heck, it was so warm this week, I’m even going to leave it on cracked ice.

I have a pretty serious, “one and done,” policy with Savoy Cocktails, and sometimes it is a struggle to get home, get everything together, and make the damn cocktail.

However, looking at this video, I see a lot of mistakes were made in the execution of this version of the Mr. Manhattan.

My first mistake was being literal and using a sugar cube. There’s no reason, really, to use a sugar cube in a cocktail. They just don’t dissolve well enough unless you spend about a half an hour muddling the damn thing. Use simple syrup, superfine, or at least caster sugar any time you are mixing drinks. My second mistake was that it’s really apparent I over squeezed the Meyer Lemon and undersqueezed the orange. I should have been using a measuring cup, so the juice wasn’t going right into the drink. Last, I used the stupid wrong spoon to mix with. I should have grabbed the spoon with the disk end, so I could do a good job of churning up this julep-ish version of the Mr. Manhattan.

All the same, this wasn’t bad at all, if a bit dry. There are definitely a lot of good points to the Genever Mr. Manhattan and I strongly recommend it as a drink. Just do a better job of mixing it than I did.

This post is one in a series documenting my ongoing effort to make all of the drinks in the Savoy Cocktail Book, starting at the first, Abbey, and ending at the last, the, uh, Sauterne Cup.